Area coverage by robotic appliances is used in a growing number of applications, such as robotic lawn mowers, robotic vacuum cleaners, robotic window cleaners, robotic painting and the like. In such applications the robot is moving within a working area defined by a boundary, detectable by the robot sensors (such as tactile, optical, electromagnetic sensors etc.) and carries a payload (which may include one or more cutting blades, vacuuming nozzles, rotating brushes, painting brushes etc., depending on the function that the payload is intended to provide) across the entire area until adequately covered. There are various strategies of area coverage, such as random and systematic coverage and various paths of movement used for the actual scanning such as straight lines (either parallel or with varying directions), spirals etc.
An important part of the scanning is the borders handling: the movement the robot performs when the boundary is detected. Commonly used strategies include stopping the robot once the boundary is detected, and then to either turn to a different direction and move forwards in that direction, or to reverse along the original direction. All these strategies are time consuming and, in fact, the total time spent on the boundary handling in some applications may take on average about 10-15% of the total scanning time.